Arts

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning “The Skin of Our Teeth” spans 5,000 years, including an ice age, dinosaurs, and war. Its odd mischief still sparkles in a Lincoln Center revival.

Sometimes, more is more, and proudly so. There is nothing else on Broadway this season like the multi-sensory bath that is Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (opening tonight to May 29), directed with a freewheeling epic mischief by Lileana Blain-Cruz.

This production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a comedy first produced on stage in 1942, coincides with the 125th anniversary of Wilder’s birth (he died in 1975), and is so rarely performed that many of its oddities—the play within a play, characters speaking to us as the actors who portray them, dinosaurs to cheer for—seem like modern add-ons. But Wilder wrote this bonkers marriage of absurdity, philosophy, and apocalypse as spoken. Some additional material in this production comes from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

The Antrobus family lives in a 5,000-year span of history, which means the Ice Age rages outside their early 20th-century home in the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. A huge dinosaur and woolly mammoth occupy the home (the stunning creations of James Ortiz), chewing on the plants and inviting head-stroking. Jeremy Gallardo, Beau Thom, Alphonso Walker Jr., and Sarin Monae West are the puppeteers responsible for these creations’ stage movements. The dinosaur is wondrous, and the mammoth will bring back the best Fraggle Rock memories.

It is the Antrobuses’ maid Sabina (Gabby Beans, manically fierce and funny, and deserves-to-be-award-nominated), who soon makes it clear she, as the actor playing her, is not buying any of anything that is unfolding before our eyes. It is not the first time Sabina steps out of the action as her own portrayer, or the action itself ceases, as we are taken into a play that, like the set, seems precarious at best. In character she cleans, and frets about the safe arrival of patriarch George Antrobus (James Vincent Meredith) home. The needy flock to their home, including people claiming to be Moses and Homer.

In the second act of we are on the Atlantic City boardwalk, so beautifully immediate and colorful you can almost smell the saltwater taffy, before the skies darken and we await the approach of a terrifying-sounding storm, culminating in what seems like the formation of Noah’s Ark.

In the final part of the play is back in the living room of the Antrobus family home, now a burnt and blasted husk after the end of a seven-year war. Sadly the dinosaur and mammoth are only in it for one act. This critic wished in vain for their return. (Speaking of time travel, the original 1942 cast included Montgomery Clift and Tallulah Bankhead, if anyone wants to teleport with me to back then.)

At Lincoln Center, Roslyn Ruff plays matriarch Maggie Antrobus as an archly absent, elegant hostess (the excellent costumes are by Montana Levi Blanco), who refuses to countenance any chaos erupting around her. George is a caring patriarch, but also someone to be feared, and a potentially adulterous leader of the “Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans,” which he is going to be sworn in as president of. Gladys (Paige Gilbert) and Henry (Julian Robertson) are trapped between childhood and adulthood, until finally they are one almost a parent, and the other a disturbed casualty of war determined to kill their father. (Earlier we learn that Henry was called Cain, and has killed his brother; and so perhaps George and Maggie are supposed to be Adam and Eve, the ur-parents of the world traveling through its time.)

In the Boardwalk section, Sabina switches from a hysterically protective maid and family retainer to a beauty queen in disguise keen to destroy the Antrobus’ marriage, before her third-act transformation into a sober teller of history and restorer of family unity.

The play similarly ricochets between riotous comedy and depth-searching drama—the war-scarred third act has nowhere to go but down. But even towards the end, the play stops itself early in its establishment of gloom to introduce us to new actors, because others have allegedly come down with what seems like food poisoning. Wilder loves taking a pin to his own seriousness.

We are not sure why certain things happen in the play. The three settings are lost in their own stretches and definitions of time. But the play returns repeatedly to the idea that whatever era we are in, the end of the world is either nigh, or is being experienced, or has just been survived—so what next?

It is significant that the Antrobus family is Black, as Blain-Cruz told the New York Times: “Placing the question of human survival on a Black family just lifts the stakes so much, because we felt that precariousness for so long, and we still feel it today. It’s not, ‘Will I make it?’ It is literally, ‘Will we survive under all of this never-ending pressure?’ That feels really powerful for this moment—that this family can contain those feelings and that pain in such a specific way that it again becomes universal as we all question our survival.”

Beans-as-Sabina makes it clear she finds what she has been asked to perform utterly absurd. Of course, no one lives 5,000 years. Of course, a family living in 20th-century America cannot also live in the Ice Age with dinosaurs roaming around the house. But still, even without the opt-out clauses we are offered by Sabina/Beans, we lean into the absurdity and the depth beneath.

Adam Riggs’ design is the most stunning of this Broadway season. The midcentury home self-destructs, the boardwalk is beautiful, and includes a working, really fun-looking slide, and then finally, a kind of jungle of plants comes to dominate the post-war home.

As Blain-Cruz and her company provide a feast for mind and eyes, philosophically the play becomes denser and richer over its three-hour period. We see the ravages of war on a global scale, and the betrayals within a family. We see ruin, and hedonism. There is temptation, and exhaustion. There is trying to maintain order, and anarchy. And there is nature, always there—frozen, in bloom, wild, defiled, and yet as persistent as the aging-resistant family.

Mrs. Antrobus makes a powerful speech about safeguarding family life (which to modern ears sounds a preamble to a manifesto for bigotry), and it is striking that through the 5,000 years the family unit, scuffed and beaten, endures every ravage of every era. When a fortune teller (Priscilla Lopez) appears on the boardwalk, she is not the parodic doomsayer of so many other plays and films, but someone exhausted with the nonsense of humans who seek her counsel.

This play is a blizzard of words and images, and as Sabina tells us throughout, understand or don’t understand of it what you will. But, just as the play is a maelstrom, so is the world’s history it sketches. The Antrobuses survive it all, transgressing all laws of nature and biology—and so, Wilder seems to be saying, the best of their qualities (loyalty, fortitude, just making do and carrying on) may well be the ones that sustain us. That, and also having a dinosaur as a pet.